On Sat, Dec 12, 2009 at 4:22 AM, Matt Hamilton <[email protected]> wrote: > A really interesting piece on Open Source. From the shows we go to, I can > already start to see this a bit and I think that we might want to bear the > points in the article in mind with future plone.org/.net/etc work. > > http://blogs.gartner.com/brian_prentice/2009/12/09/open-source-is-trending-towards-customer-obscurity/
Matt - thanks for sending this link. I agree that most customers (at least the ones I spoke with at Gilbane), don't really care whether a CMS is open source or not. Really what they care about is the longevity of the software, available support and does it do what I need it to do. The fact that it's open source is just icing on the cake, but they won't make their purchase decision solely based on this. Think about it - if you are not a coder, the argument that you can see and modify the source code doesn't really carry much weight. The idea that a software package is supported by a community of developers around the world also doesn't carry much weight, because if I'm purchasing a CMS, I want one phone number to call when something goes wrong and not have to rely on mailing lists and IRC to get my questions answered. Of course, this is where we direct them to plone.net (which btw is in need of a design overhaul) to see the list of over 300 vendors in 60 countries who provide professional support services for Plone. I'm just trying to frame this in the eyes of the decision-maker, so that when we position Plone in the marketplace we keep these things in mind. Open Source *is* a unique selling point, but not one I would lead with when explaining what Plone is. "What can Plone do for me?" should be the first question we must answer. Then after they've shown interest in what Plone can do for them, we can get into the benefits of open source software. Brian also has a nice blog post about the caveats of COSS - Commerical Open Source Software http://blogs.gartner.com/brian_prentice/2009/11/09/commercial-open-source-software-caveat-emptor/ Nate -- Nate Aune - [email protected] http://www.jazkarta.com http://card.ly/natea http://tungle.me/natea +1 (617) 517-4953 _______________________________________________ Evangelism mailing list [email protected] http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/evangelism
